It begins. The single most important tournament for NHL scouts. The world junior hockey championship.

Scouts from all 30 NHL teams have descended upon Ufa, Russia, site of this year’s tournament, to begin picking apart the games of the world’s best teenaged hockey players to see how they do against each other.

“It’s the one tournament where you cover both amateur and pro,” said Leafs assistant GM Dave Nonis. “For that reason, it’s probably the most important tournament of the year.”

The Leafs will have had up to six front-office types and scouts attend the tournament or the pretournament camps. Some teams are going with smaller contingents. All are formulating plans for the draft while starting to get a book ready on the players already drafted.

“You need your pro scouts there to watch them, to see how they (the players you drafted) have progressed since they were drafted,” says Nonis. “But as important, you’re starting to get a look at the other teams’ draft picks.

“You never know when you’re going to make a deal that involves an unsigned player.”

The Leafs will be closely monitoring the play of Morgan Rielly on Team Canada, Tyler Biggs and Garret Sparks on Team USA and Tom Nilsson on Sweden. But all teams have reason to watch in the hopes their drafted players shine.

“You want to see how players perform in the heat of the biggest moments,” said Doug Armstrong, general manager of the St. Louis Blues. “When you have a player who can come to the world junior championship and step his game up, that gives you a real good indication.

“We were fortunate in consecutive world juniors, we had (defenceman) Alex Pietrangelo play really good in Saskatchewan (in 2010) and then we had (forward Vladimir) Tarasenko play really good in Buffalo (in 2011),” added Armstrong. “You walk out of there with a good feeling that your prospects can play in the big moments.”

Pietrangelo has blossomed into one of the NHL’s premier rearguards. The Blues are eagerly anticipating Tarasenko’s rookie season.

But of course, it doesn’t always work out. A great world junior performance doesn’t necessarily translate into NHL stardom, or even an NHL job.

Leaf fans remember goalie Justin Pogge as a world-beater in 2006 but he’s yet to find a regular gig in the bigs. His three shutouts in that tournament were a big reason why Canada won gold. The 26-year-old is playing in Italy.

“His play raised expectations for what he might become,” said former Leafs GM John Ferguson Jr., who had drafted Pogge in 2005.

“His play in that tournament went a long way for us ranking him high enough to take him where we did, in the second round (in 2006),” said Ferguson.

When it comes to the undrafted — like Canada’s Jonathan Drouin and Nate MacKinnon — scouts won’t hold a weak tournament against them. Ultimately, they’re playing an age group up.

“The NHL scouts and management understand this is a 19-year-old’s tournament,” says Dan Marr, chief scout for the NHL’s central scouting service. “The fact that the kids are selected to the team bodes well for his resume in the eyes of NHL personnel. If he finds a way to play, that works well for him.

“There’s no way a world junior tournament works against an undrafted player.”

Typically, an underage player on a world junior team will be more of a role player. MacKinnon — the No. 1 centre on the Halifax Mooseheads — will kill penalties. If he’s successful at it, the scouts will notice.

“It shows they’re able to adapt. It shows their versatility. It shows their commitment,” said Marr. “It’s a two-week tournament. You have to be focused and apply yourself and you have to learn a new system and put it in the game in a short period of time within the framework of a team.

“The fact they can do that tells you a lot about their hockey sense and their character. It tells you they are a team player.”

The better tournaments to gauge draft-eligible players are the Ivan Hlinka Memorial in August and the IIHF under-18 tournament in the spring. Not all the best are typically at that spring tournament because it conflicts with the Memorial Cup.

So an added bonus for the world junior is for the players themselves. MacKinnon and Drouin will play against American defenceman Seth Jones and Finnish forward Aleksander Barkov — two legitimate contenders for No. 1 in next summer’s draft.

“They get to rank themselves against the other players they know about but haven’t before competed against,” said former Calgary Flames GM Craig Button, now an analyst for TSN. “Kids in their draft year know everybody is watching, they want to put their best foot forward.

“I don’t think the world junior is a place where you can put significant weighting on good or bad performances. You can evaluate their progress and see where they fit in. But you have to be really careful about putting disproportionate weight on. It can’t be the be all and end all.”

For example, Ryan Nugent-Hopkins — who already has a year in the NHL under his belt — is on Team Canada. “If Ryan Nugent-Hopkins makes Seth Jones look ordinary, well, I got new for you: Ryan Nugent-Hopkins makes lots of people look ordinary, who are already in NHL,” said Button.

“But if players of lesser ability make a guy like Seth Jones look ordinary, it’s not that you hold it against him, it just leads you to further evaluate, to ask more questions. It’s situational.”

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